We specialize in world-conquering restaurant trends in our town, but the first of them wasn't the barbecued chicken pizzeria, the theme restaurant or even the drive-in. It was the cafeteria.
Yes, the cafeteria. And the old-time L.A. cafeterias were far better than you might imagine. With live music, appealing food and decor that could make Dodd Mitchell's hyper-designed restaurants look modest, they were so important in the '20s that one writer dubbed L.A. "Sunny Cafeteria."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday November 07, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 42 words Type of Material: Correction
Historic cafeteria -- In Wednesday's Food section, a timeline accompanying an article about cafeterias gave an incorrect address for the original Boos Bros. cafeteria, which opened in 1906. It was at 211 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, not 211 W. Spring St.
As late as the 1950s, many people still considered a cafeteria quite grand. My grandfather always put on a jacket and tie before going out, with grave dignity, to shove a tray along the rails.
For an L.A. full of uprooted newcomers in the 1920s, they were the quintessential modern, California way to dine, and at one time there were scores of them here. Only three remain.
The cafeteria craze started in May 1905, when a woman named Helen Mosher opened a humble downtown L.A. restaurant where people chose their food at a long counter and carried their own trays to their tables. Using the slogans "Food That Can Be Seen" and "No Tips," she called it the Cafeteria.
The idea of a self-service restaurant was in the air; restaurateurs had been moving toward it for more than a decade. There had been experiments in Eastern cities with smorgasbord service, where you filled one plate at a counter, paid and took it to your table. In 1898, the Childs restaurants in New York took the crucial step of letting you slide a tray along on rails so you could load it up with several plates at a time.
The word "cafeteria" wasn't first used in Los Angeles (in 1893 a man named John Kruger had opened a place in Chicago modeled on European smorgasbords and called it the Cafeteria), but it was tailor-made for L.A. In 1905, all things Latino seemed long ago and far away around here. They conjured up dreams of California's romantic past: the Mission Days, the fabled Days of the Dons! Hard though it may be to imagine now, Mosher might have chosen the name "cafeteria" because it sounded ... colorful. In any case, the cafeteria phenomenon that swept the country in the '20s was acknowledged to come from California, not New York or Chicago.
